I don't even have a dog in the fight that Brendan Kiley's pulled me into here, but I think I might have to rent one. Me on Face Book yesterday
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Before I retired from theatre nearly two years ago I liked to write essays about the art form’s problems (“On Institutional Arrogance”), and what made it great, (“How Can I Talk About the Borrowers?”), but I never did manage to write all the essays I wanted to. By the end, I had a whole file full of titles I would never flesh out. I even wrote an essay about that (“Surplus Titles”). One of my favorite leftovers was “Better Dead”, under which I intended to provide an explanation to the uninitiated that despite the image they might hold in their minds of playwrights being central to the making of theatre in modern America, the fact is, our absence is the usual and preferred state of engagement, and if we can manage to be dead, preferably for a long enough time that our work is in the public domain, then we are even more popular among our non-playwriting theatre colleagues.
This past Saturday, the CW became the last broadcast television network to cut Saturday morning cartoons. The CW is replacing its Saturday cartoon programming, called “The Vortexx,” with “One Magnificent Morning,” a five-hour bloc of non-animated TV geared towards teens and their families.
Those of us who remember the age of three and only three networks, also recall fondly that, once upon a time the only way you could watch animated cartoons was to wake up on Saturday morning and catch what ABC, NBC or CBS had on offer. Here is what a typical Saturday line up looked like when I was my son Keelans’ age. It includes classics like Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker mixed in with more circa 70’s fair, like The Scooby Doo/Dynamutt Hour, and a personal favorite, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, which came on so late, 12 noon, that my mom was usually hectoring me by that time to get outside because I had already wasted too much of “perfectly nice day” watching that “idiot box.”
“But Mom! It’s Fat Albert!”
Birth of an Institution
Happily, theatre—as specifically embodied by director/producer Jim Jewell— did not let the tradition of Saturday morning cartoons go gently into the good night. Instead, Jewell saw the demise coming, and made a plan to fill the gap with short plays written by teams of local Northwest playwrights and their kids. “Saturday mornings used to belong to kids,” says Jewell. “I remember waiting all week for that one day I could binge on cartoons for hours. So, we wanted to try and create that same feeling with some fun live theater, and what better way to understand what kind of art kids want to see than engaging them in the creation of it?”
The results of Jewell’s brainstorm will be making their world premiere over three Saturdays this November, at the Pocket Theatre [https://thepocket.org/] on Phinney Ridge in Seattle.
My sons, Declan and Keelan, and I teamed up to write “Magical Man and the Space Needle of Hideousness”, just one episode in the continuing adventures of Magical Man and his million-plus year sojourn in our paltry four palpable dimensions.
MAGICAL MAN: I call myself Magical Man. Yeah, I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t say my actual name in your universe. There aren’t enough dimensions.
I’ve been in your world for one million very, VERY boring years.
Today I will do what I have waited all those years to accomplish. Confront Roger Wickersham, bring him to justice for his transgressions. . . .
It certainly doesn't hurt that Cody Smith and Samuel Hagen will be staring as Magical Man and Roger Wickersham, Evil PhD, respectively.
Other playwright/kid combinations include:
“Don’t Touch That Dial!” by Penelope Venturini and Marcy Rodenborn
“Roderick Saves the World (or at least the Day)” by Finn Judd and Maria Glanz
“Feline Fitness” by Olivia and Jim Jewell
“The Family Jynx” by Jack and Joe Zavadil
The plays will be brought to life by a talented ensemble, including Val Brunetto, Sam Hagen, D’Arcy Harrison, Cole Hornaday, Kacey Shiflet, and Cody Smith, with a special guest appearance by Paul Shipp. Co-directed by Shawn Belyea and Jim Jewell.
Here are the details broken out real simple like:
What? Saturday Morning Cartoons – Live!
Who? B-Sides & Rarities, a Partner Project of The 14/48 Projects, in association with Pocket Theater
Where? The Pocket Theater, 8312 Greenwood Ave N
When? November 8, 15, 22 @ 10:30am
How? Tickets for Saturday Morning Cartoons are available at The Pocket Theater website (https://thepocket.org/see/) and are $10 adults/$5 kids online (or $14/$7 at the door). Seating is general admission and all children MUST be accompanied by an adult
Parents, I promise you a good time will be had by all!
I took off work today. Nothing sneaky like calling in sick. Nope, I bit the bullet and burned a pre-arranged vacation day, so that I could be at ACT all day in advance of Sandbox Radio’s “Swing Time” going up tonight at 8 pm. As an actor, I’m not called until noon (as a writer, I’m not called at all), and since I’m only in Act I. I’m not really needed until much later that that, but I volunteered to help with the load-in. It’s something that all genuine theatre artists do, at least every so often. Here’s why…
All good and true theatre is subversive in some way. Always. It might be subversive in content, but that’s really just a surface aspect. Theatre’s true subversion comes from just existing, when all rights and logic, it shouldn’t. (If this sounds vaguely philosophical, then let me put some practical actuality around it. Václav Havel, the first president of a free Czech Republic, was a playwright before his political success. He made theatre that threatened the Soviet –backed status quo. The powers-that-were would have gladly silenced him, and sometimes did, but the subversive nature of theatre made it impossible for the totalitarian regime to shut up Havel, and other subversive theatre artists, for long.
Shows like Sandbox Radio Live! “Swing Time” aren’t supposed to happen. They don’t fit any preconceived notion of what theatre is or should be. In fact, Sandbox Radio Live!, like all good and true theatre, explodes those notions. Theatre at its best provides a venue for ideas and visions that don’t fit into the money-making machine of corporate story-telling (i.e. Hollywood, Broadway, etc.)
And in order for such wonderful subversion to take place, sometimes the artists need to make it happen with sweat equity and sheer force of will, doing jobs they were never trained for, working hours no one ever warned them about.
And thus the result is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Guaranteed.
I’m watching the first act of Sandbox Radio LIVE!: "Swing Time", which we will be performing live tomorrow at ACT in downtown Seattle, but will also be broadcasting via podcast as soon as we sweeten the sound.
I can relax a little for the moment because my two bits aren’t until act two. As per usual, I’m Sam in episode 12 of Markheim, but I also got drafted as a concessions vendor in our staging of the classic baseball balladry, “Casey at the Bat”.
There’s an intense ambient confusion to late process rehearsals—cue-to-cues and dress runs, etc.—that I find deeply unnerving, even though as a playwright I usually had absolutely zero responsibilities. Amidst the tumult, I am grateful for directors in a way I usually don’t admit to. I recall, at these times, my deep admiration for anyone who can handle chaos—indeed choreograph it— with expertise and élan. Two names leap to mind, Leslie Law, the director and producer of Sandbox Radio, and John Langs, who directed the Seattle premiere of my play Louis Slotin Sonata and the world premiere of The Sequence, my staging of the real-life race to decode the human genome. I offer you this memory of John, utterly out of context to protect the innocent and guilty alike, after having sat through 10 hours of tech as cool as a cucumber, then suddenly shouting: “Would someone please muzzle that fucking dog!” The show’s mascot Jack Russell Terrier had apparently rubbed John’s last nerve raw.
For now, I get to sit and blog to you, gentle reader, about how much I love Juliette Pruzan’s particular whimsy, which you’ll be able to witness yourself in her original piece, “Swing Time Swing Set” written especially for this show, and performed with delight by Seanjohn Walsh, Kathryn Van Meter, Amy Bush and others. I pride myself on knowing where the laughs will come in a new work. I’m not always right, but I can assure you there are plenty in this one. Probably some you’ll surprise us with when you come see tomorrow.
I recently mentioned this play in my last essay “The Misuses of Art” and then realized I had not posted it anywhere for those who might want to read it.
I had great fun watching my son open and close this piece at last year’s SOAPFest, as well as witness the exquisite work of his fellow cast members Tracy Hyland, Michael Patten and Heather Hawkins, so masterfully directed by Annie Lareau. Such a great staging. I’ll never forget it.
Every work of art is a message in a bottle, a hope that whatever it is you were trying to share when you created it makes its way to someone who can use it, ideally to make their lives, if only for a moment, a little bit better, clearer, nobler, happier, or more hopeful or truthful, or at the very least, more fun.
No one at Seattle’s Big Houses really cares about developing new work. (Thankfully this one seems to be changing (a tiny bit, but for real, (but only time will truly tell.)))
But nothing I said was more certain to piss off particular people like my contention that one-person shows are not, strictly speaking, theatre. My award for favorite counterstrike, if only for prolixity and opacity, goes to Omar Willey:
Mike Daisey’s [work] is not theater[?] Behind this sort of nonsense is a childish territorialism. The artist here believes he is a High Priest in charge of the cosmic order, and that the entire world would suddenly whirl off its axis if He did not continue to fight for his own narrow definitions, categories and hierarchies–and, by implication, his own place in those hierarchies which, doubtless, is above everyone else he despises. Those who do not accord with his gospel become enemy troops to be extirpated in his Holy Crusade for the One True and Good Art. Such belligerence may be a defense, but it is primarily a defense of human ego. Yet artists cling to such silly notions as though they were essential for craft.
Despite Willey’s daunting hyperbole (heck, I haven’t donned High Priest robes since my college days), I haven’t changed my mind about one-person shows (nor do I delude myself to believe I’ve changed anyone else’s). I still really do think theatre is defined by genuine dialogue between two or more human beings, in the presence of at least one third observer; and I stand by the second and more crucial associated argument made in my original essay, “The Solo Show: A Risk Averse Artistic Administrator’s Best Friend”:
[Artistic Administrators] defend their solo performance offerings like a richly-endowed sculpture gallery might defend an exhibition of paintings. “We love sculpture. And of course we are a sculpture gallery, but sculpture itself is expensive and difficult to maintain. Instead, why not enjoy some lovely paintings of sculptures?” Paintings of sculptures can indeed be lovely, but not even an idiot would call them sculptures, any more than Mark Twain would have referred to himself as a theatre artist 130 years ago. Solo performance billed as theatre is a pig in a poke.
Still, no matter how carefully one build one’s boldest arguments, there will always be an example that seems to fly in the face of everything asserted. So when I say solo shows aren’t really theatre, my long time colleague and often collaborator, Dawson Nichols simply puts on a show or two to prove me wrong. Unlike most solo performers, Nichols doesn’t just tell you a story, with a few different voices thrown in for “dramatic effect”. Instead Dawson, himself a consummate playwright as well as actor, director and professor, plays you a play. He’s as adept at transforming himself into other human beings as, say, the vaunted Anna Deavere Smith, but unlike her, he’s no monologist. Dawson creates dialogue up there, real theatre between two or more people, because freakily enough, he actually appears to be able to become two or more people at one time, right in front of our eyes. All the risk that is removed by having only one person on stage is strangely, magically, mixed back into the cauldron.
But don’t my word for it. (I mean, there’s no point in starting NOW, right?) For the next two Fridays, you can go see for yourself, and decide if he succeeds in smashing my “childish territorialism.”
Almost exactly this time last year we were gearing up to open the world premiere of Ballard House Duet, with Custom Made Play Project and Washington Ensemble Theatre. Not many people saw the show, and between now and then, the production sort of got lost in the very fun, ever shifting, always sexy shuffle that is Seattle Theatre.
For me, however, the production will always loom large and poignant. The play came from a very personal place, and represents the last world premiere for the stage in which I expect to participate. And so, remembering back to a year ago, I am deeply grateful to Rebecca Olson for asking me to write Ballard House Duet; and for then agreeing, along with Hana Lass, to an unconventional process of development that began with me prying into their personal and professional biographies. I am grateful Erin Kraft for agreeing to direct it and giving me so much desperately needed developmental feedback. I am grateful to Annie Lareau for taking the helm when Erin had to step away for personal reasons. And I am grateful to all the people who gave freely of their time and talent to make sure the play went up and succeeded as a work of art. I’m looking at you Brandy Beauchamp, Peter Dylan O’Connor, Hannah Victoria Franklin, Doug Mazzeo, Betsy Schwartz, Jen Taylor, and everyone else that I know I’m forgetting in my encroaching senescence.
I hope you all have had a great year, and will go one to an even better one in 2014.
Ain't got no rain barrel, Ain't got no cellar door. But we'll be jolly friends, Forever more, more, more, more, more.
Sure bigger isn’t always better, and art doesn’t always thrive when it moves to a fancier-panted venue. I know I’d rather have seen the Beatles work the Cavern Club in Liverpool—or even better, one of the Hamburg dives they learned their chops in—rather than Shea Stadium, where even they couldn’t hear themselves play.
So there are inevitably doubters about Sandbox Radio LIVE’s move to the much larger venue of ACT’s Falls Theatre for its upcoming episode, January 13, 2004. But here’s the thing: for about three years running we have sold out every live taping of SBRL! that we have produced at West of Lenin, our perfectly cozy little venue in Fremont. That means there are people—lots of people—actually, that would like to experience the unique fun of witnessing the live recording of our podcasts who can’t, simply because we don’t have seats for them.
This move can help us reach more people with our unique live performance offering which is quite literally (old-school usage) different from anything you have ever seen, featuring some of Seattle’s finest actors performing brand new locally sourced material generated by some of Seattle’s finest playwrights and (ahem) former playwrights.
In short, this is the kind of bold artistic risk that deserves your reward. So how can you help? Just come! Click this link and order your tickets so that we can have friendly butts in every new seat we’re adding. Help us spread the fun of Sandbox Radio Live! Do it for the Beatles! (It’s what Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe would’ve wanted.)
The details:
January 13, 2014 at 8:00pm
ACT’s Falls Theatre
Running Time: 2 hours (including an intermission)
The Food of Love includes new short audio plays from Seattle playwrights Vincent Delaney, Elizabeth Heffron, and Wayne Rawley, a fresh new episode of Paul Mullin's noir-angel serial Markheim, the latest adventure of Scot Augustson's hilarious Cousin Katie, special guest Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings, our fabulous live sfx, original music from Jose “Juicy” Gonzales and the Sandbox Radio Orchestra, and more surprises, all recorded in front of you, our "studio" audience.
Oh, and know that you can always enjoy the fun of Sandbox Radio, going back to our very first episode, by clicking below and downloading the podcasts:
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